Tershakovets, Mykhailo

Tershakovets, Mykhailo [Тершаковець, Михайло; Teršakovec', Myxajlo], b 11 June 1883 in Klitsko, Rudky county, Galicia, d 6 February 1978 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Slavist and pedagogue; member (from 1914) and honorary member (from 1974) of the Shevchenko Scientific Society. He studied at the Academic Gymnasium of Lviv (1894–1902) and at Lviv University (1902–5, 1906–7) and Vienna University (1905–6). He then taught Ukrainian and classical philology for many years (1906–12, 1913–39, 1941–4) at the Academic Gymnasium and briefly (1940–1) at Lviv University. As a postwar displaced person he taught the Ukrainian language at Vienna University (1945–7), where he received his PH D in Slavic philology in 1948. In 1949 he emigrated to the United States and settled in Philadelphia.

Tershakovets’s first scholarly article, a study of Markiian Shashkevych which was published in Zapysky Naukovoho tovarystva im. Shevchenka (ZNTSh) in 1904 and was based on pioneering archival research at the library of the People's Home in Lviv, resulted in his election to the Shevchenko Scientific Society while he was still a student. In Vienna's archives he discovered many valuable documents illuminating the Western Ukrainian national revival of the 1830s and 1840s, which he published as a book in 1907. In 1908 he published a separate monograph on the revival. He also published articles, in ZNTSh and elsewhere, on Shashkevych’s biography and his translation of the Králové Dvůr manuscript, Ukrainian and South Slavic folk songs, V. Kopitar, the censorship of Slavic publications under Austrian rule, Rusalka Dnistrovaia (The Dnister Nymph), Denys Zubrytsky, Kyrylo Studynsky, the legend of Kyi, Shchek, Khoryv, and their sister Lybed, Metropolitan Ilarion, Prince Volodymyr Vasylkovych, Taras Shevchenko, and Vasyl Ilnytsky. His postwar monograph on Shashkevych has not been published.

Roman Senkus

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]